Embodiments of the invention described in this specification relate generally to information search and retrieval, and more particularly, to a system and a method for performing web search and information aggregation via molecular network.
An abundance of information exists as digital data that can be searched for or retrieved from many data sources or repositories. For instance, the amount of information and data available through the Internet is growing rapidly and, as a result, any given web search may retrieve a huge set of search results associated with a wide array of different websites and/or web-connected databases. Much or most of this information and data exist in a common language format (e.g., a website with text information in English or Chinese). Existing information searches, such as web searches, are based on common language search terms, phrases, or keywords (hereinafter referred to as “keyword” or “keywords”). A keyword search, in general, identifies information containing the keyword or a related word/phrase that is associated with the keyword. While information in natural language format is typically easy for a human reader to comprehend, such information is not structured for easy understanding by machines or computers.
Keyword-based web searches often fail to identify closely-related information or data which does not include one or more of the keywords used in the search. In some cases, there are few or no natural language keywords that correlate to certain types of information. This is problematic in fields which have defined strong relational associations between different information and which may depend on one or more aspects of the information that do not correlate to a set of natural language keywords.
Therefore, what is needed is a way to perform a common language keyword-based search for information according to a set of well-defined rules and relationships to make web search more intelligent and efficient and to provide more relevant search results.